returns the handle for subsequent calls to following
functions. Argument is the name of the application. Optionally can be
followed by two arguments for IN
and OUT
filehandles. These
arguments should be globs.

adds the line to the history of input, from where it can be used if
the actual readline is present.

IN
, OUT

return the filehandles for input and output or undef if readline
input and output cannot be used for Perl.

MinLine

If argument is specified, it is an advice on minimal size of line to
be included into history. undef means do not include anything into
history. Returns the old value.

findConsole

returns an array with two strings that give most appropriate names for
files for input and output using conventions "<$in"
, ">out"
.

Attribs

returns a reference to a hash which describes internal configuration
of the package. Names of keys in this hash conform to standard
conventions with the leading rl_
stripped.

Features

Returns a reference to a hash with keys being features present in
current implementation. Several optional features are used in the
minimal interface: appname
should be present if the first argument
to new
is recognized, and minline
should be present if
MinLine
method is not dummy. autohistory
should be present if
lines are put into history automatically (maybe subject to
MinLine
), and addhistory
if addhistory
method is not dummy.

If Features
method reports a feature attribs
as present, the
method Attribs
is not dummy.

Additional supported functions

Actually Term::ReadLine
can use some other package, that will
support a richer set of commands.

All these commands are callable via method interface and have names
which conform to standard conventions with the leading rl_
stripped.

The stub package included with the perl distribution allows some
additional methods:

The first call-back registered is the call back for waiting. It is
expected that the callback will call the current event loop until
there is something waiting to get on the input filehandle. The parameter
passed in is the return value of the second call back.

The second call-back registered is the call back for registration. The
input filehandle (often STDIN, but not necessarily) will be passed in.

This will cause the data array ref to be removed, allowing normal garbage
collection to clean it up. With AnyEvent, that will cause $data->[0] to
be cleaned up, and AnyEvent will automatically cancel the watcher at that
time. If another loop requires more than that to clean up a file watcher,
that will be up to the caller to handle.

ornaments

makes the command line stand out by using termcap data. The argument
to ornaments
should be 0, 1, or a string of a form
"aa,bb,cc,dd"
. Four components of this string should be names of
terminal capacities, first two will be issued to make the prompt
standout, last two to make the input line standout.

newTTY

takes two arguments which are input filehandle and output filehandle.
Switches to use these filehandles.

One can check whether the currently loaded ReadLine package supports
these methods by checking for corresponding Features
.

EXPORTS

None

ENVIRONMENT

The environment variable PERL_RL
governs which ReadLine clone is
loaded. If the value is false, a dummy interface is used. If the value
is true, it should be tail of the name of the package to use, such as
Perl
or Gnu
.

As a special case, if the value of this variable is space-separated,
the tail might be used to disable the ornaments by setting the tail to
be o=0
or ornaments=0
. The head should be as described above, say

If the variable is not set, or if the head of space-separated list is
empty, the best available package is loaded.

export"PERL_RL=Perl o=0"# Use Perl ReadLine sans ornaments

export"PERL_RL= o=0"# Use best available ReadLine sans ornaments

(Note that processing of PERL_RL
for ornaments is in the discretion of the
particular used Term::ReadLine::*
package).